This year, the number of Android viruses will reach 1 million

By the end of 2013, the number of harmful programs aimed at mobile devices based on Android OS will reach one million. According to Open Systems, the antivirus company Trend Micro made such a forecast, according to Open Systems .

At the same time, at the end of 2012, Trend Micro experts counted about 350 thousand harmful and potentially dangerous applications designed for attacks on the Google mobile platform.

Thus, over the past three years, the population of Android Viruses has grown more than the number of viruses for personal computers over 14 years, the company experts say.

Unlike the first PC viruses, malicious Android programs have been focused on making profit from the very beginning - for example, by secret sending SMS to paid numbers. However, they are still rarely used to steal confidential information. Target viral attacks are more common in the PC world, experts note.

A significant proportion of malicus is distributed through websites. 23% of pages with infected programs found by the Trend Micro experts were on sites registered in the USA, but this does not mean anything, since it was impossible to establish the country of location for 56% of the address.

Trend Micro also count the popularity of various keywords with which attackers lure visitors to their sites. At the beginning of 2012, the words Law Enforceement ("Law enforcement"), Tax Season ("Tax period"), London 2012 Olympics and Tibet were popular, and in the second half of the year the leadership was captured by the iPhone 5, World of Warcraft, Christmas ("Christmas") and Thinksgiving ("Thanksgiving").

Researchers also once again pay attention to the carelessness of Android users, most of whom do not realize the threatening danger. According to Trend Micro, on only one of the five devices based on Android, antivirus software is installed.